[TeMPOraL]

Wonder how many people here have similar story.

In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles?

Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.